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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a